Thwap

Yesterday, Google unveiled their next foray into the social networking scene, Google+. Over the last 36 hours, there has been more chatter about Google+ than any other tech launch since the iPhone first came out. People are standing in virtual lines around the block trying to get into Google+, with some users figuring out clever work-around to get their friends in.

Over the past 24 hours since I received my Google+ invite, I’ve been playing with it nearly non-stop. In that time, I’ve determined that the Google+ Circles (analogous to Facebook’s friend lists) can be a powerful new way to share the right information with the right people. If used correctly, Circles can make Google+ feel like an intimate gathering of friends instead of a night out at the bar shouting at the top of your lungs.

Circles allows you to decide what topics that you discuss would be interesting to which friends. On Facebook, people share everything with everybody. For example, I have a group of friends that are big hockey fans. During the Stanley Cup Playoffs this year, they would post a status update to Facebook every time a team scored. As somebody who wasn’t following the playoffs and didn’t care too terribly much, this created a lot of noise in my Facebook news feed. I didn’t want to block these friends outright, since they did post things not hockey related that I cared about, but their posts about hockey really decreased the signal to noise ratio of my Facebook news feed.

Google+ Circles enables users to easily change this behavior. I’m a fairly avid cyclist and enjoy watching professional cycling. With the Tour de France starting this Saturday, I’m sure I’ll use Google+ to chronicle my opinion about the race as the much despised Alberto Contador goes head-to-head with our scrappy hero, Andy Schleck. I know that most of my friends won’t care about this, but a couple will. Circles makes it much easier for me to only share this cycling commentary with those few friends that will care, and leave my thoughts on cycling out of the feeds of friends who really don’t care.

But here’s the secret about Circles: if I use Circles correctly, I create value for my friends and aquantances, not for myself. I can’t tell Google+ to not show me hockey related stuff from friends that post about hockey. Google+ doesn’t know which posts are hockey related, and it doesn’t know that I don’t want to know about hockey. It takes my friends putting me into appropriate circles and then using those circles to share the appropriate information with me.

Google+ Circles can be a powerful new way to share the right information with the right people. However, it’s going to take all of us thinking of what each other’s interests are and limiting what we share to those interests. For Circles to be a success, we need to show a bit of empathy and understanding towards one another, and it’s going to require all of us to break our habit of sharing every thought that runs through our head with everybody we possibly can. I, for one, will be ruthless in uncircling people who habitually share things I don’t care about.